#Foreclosure

[alwaysbewoke]

[checktheotherroom]

elk sheds

source; jennifer ebbs

2023

[twistedmixtress]

5 20-something queers in Tennessee need help saving their home. we're experiencing some major financial hardships and if we can't raise the money to save it we will all be homeless before december 1st. please, please signalboost and help any way you can. i'm terrified. we're desperate.

[eternalnight8806-3]

PLEASE HELP!

I have officially received a pre-foreclosure notice for my house. I know it's a lot to ask, but any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated! Please share! Thank you!

Paypal Link

GoFundMe Link

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Biden set to appoint mass foreclosure cheerleader to the Fed

Personnel are policy, something that the Biden administration has proved again and again since the 2020 election. Biden himself is a kind of empty vessel into which different wings of the Democratic party pour their will, yielding a strange brew of appointments both great and terrible.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/06/personnel-are-policy/#janice-eberly

On the one hand, you have progressive appointments like Jonathan Kanter at the DoJ and Lina Khan at the FTC, leaders who are determined to challenge and curb corporate power:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/10/see-you-in-the-funny-papers/#bidens-legacy

On the other hand, you have deferential leaders like Pete Buttigieg, who fill their own staff with status quo counsel, and then let those timid corporate apologists run the show, leaving the substantial enforcement powers of a powerful agency to gather dust:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

While the Democrats’ anti-corporate wing got to drive the administration’s competition agencies, the corporate wing has enjoyed near-total dominance over finance regulations (with notable exceptions, e.g. Rohit Chopra), starting with Trump’s Jerome Powell, a bloodletting monster happy to shovel workers into their bosses’ crushers all day long:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/19/creditors-vs-workers/#finance-colored-glasses

Corporate Dems continue to flex their muscle. A seat has just opened up on the Federal Reserve Board, and the WSJ is pretty sure the seat is going to Janice Eberly, a corporate ghoul who helped Obama Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner steal Americans’ houses on behalf of the bankers who destroyed the world economy in 2008:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-considers-two-economists-for-fed-vice-chair-58f13344

A quick refresher: Obama inherited the Great Financial Crisis, a massive global asset crash that followed from a decade of real-estate and derivatives deregulation that saw the world’s largest banks issuing mortgages they knew would fail, and then placing massive bets on “collateralized debt obligations” that were supposed to offset the risk.

The banks gambled trillions, nearly destroyed the world’s economy, and then blamed it all on reckless borrowers — mortgage holders who had been mis-sold predatory mortgages that were designed to trigger defaults thanks to low “teaser rates” that later “ballooned” into monthly payments the banks knew the borrowers couldn’t afford.

Geithner was Obama’s go-to guy for the GFC. It was under his leadership that billions were handed out to the banks to bail them out and keep them solvent during the crisis — and it was also under his leadership that bank execs were able to pay themselves millions in bonuses using that public money.

When the banks were in trouble, Geithner leapt into action. When the banks’ customers faced crises, he was MIA — especially during the foreclosure epidemic that followed, as the banks stole our homes out from under us, often forging the paperwork. No bank was seriously punished for this policy.

Back to Janice Eberly, who served as Geithner’s assistant secretary of the Treasury for economic policy — his hatchet-woman, in other words. Now, sometimes people in senior government roles stick around because they disagree with their bosses and want to mitigate the harm of their bosses’ policies.

That’s not why Eberly took the job. In 2014, she and Arvind Krishnamurthy co-wrote a Brookings Institute paper called “Efficient Credit Policies in a Housing Debt Crisis,” that explained why Geithner had it right all along — bailing out the banks and leaving homeowners in foreclosure is “efficient”:

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/fall2014bpea_eberly_krishnamurthy.pdf

Writing in The American Prospect, Max Moran from the Revolving Door Project breaks down “Efficient Credit Policies,” explaining how Eberly’s stated views should disqualify her from sitting on the Fed board, especially as we teeter on the brink of a deep financial crisis:

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-03-06-janice-eberly-fed-nominee-mortgage-crisis/

The first thing you need to understand here is HAMP, the Home Affordable Modification Program, which received the $100b Congress allocated to help homeowners whose mortgages were “underwater” — that is, whose houses were worth less than they owed for them.

That money could have gone to “principal reduction” — that is, to paying off part of your loan. If you owned $350,000 on a house that was now worth $300,000, the Feds could give the bank $50k and you wouldn’t be underwater anymore. The FDIC proposed just this, in a plan that would have required homeowners to pay back the US government if the price of their homes rebounded.

If you want to keep Americans from losing their homes, principal reduction is a straightforward and reliable approach. But the banks hated this — and that meant Geithner wouldn’t do it. Banks don’t like principal reduction because it means that they’ll lose out on future payments: reducing your principal by $50k now means that the banks won’t get hundreds of thousands of dollars over the 30 years of your mortgage.

Using the money for principal reduction would have meant the banks’ balance sheets would have looked a little worse — which, as Moran points out, is a perfectly fair outcome for banks that had just come close to destroying the world economy, especially since many of these underwater borrowers were destined to lose their houses and would never make those payments.

But Geithner didn’t do principal reduction. Instead, he did HAMP, which was just a way to temporarily lower borrowers’ monthly payments so they could stay in their homes. Geithner sold Obama on this plan, convincing him to renege on his election promise to support a “cramdown” on the banks, which would have saved homeowners:

https://www.propublica.org/article/dems-obama-broke-pledge-to-force-banks-to-help-homeowners

HAMP was full of the kinds of complex requirements and paperwork that the professional managerial class love, rules that made it almost impossible for homeowners to invoke HAMP and improve their payments. Meanwhile, the banks got “investor incentive payments” that let them take in public money even as they foreclosed on the public:

https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/principal-reduction-alternative-under-the-home-affordable-modification-program

HAMP was a disaster. Almost no one managed to use it, and even among the lucky few who did manage to do so, many were tricked into foreclosure.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/mar/30/government-program-save-homes-mortgages-failure-banks

This is the policy that Eberly and Krishnamurthy defend in their paper: rather than reducing debt, just temporarily restructure mortgage payments. One reason they defend this: it’s cheaper, and Congress didn’t allocate enough money to help everyone who needed principal reduction. But, as Moran points out, Geithner’s anemic response to the crisis caused Congress to claw back $225b of the money allocated to deal with it — enough to do $50k principal reductions for 4.5m households. Under Geithner, HAMP only spent $10b.

But of course, the US government didn’t need to pay the banks off to do principal reduction. They could simply order the banks to take a loss. That’s how lending usually works: lenders who originate bad loans have to eat them — they don’t get made whole by Uncle Sucker.

But when Eberly was working for Geithner, “federal officials convinced themselves this was impossible.” Rather than hold banks to account for their reckless speculation, Geithner announced that he was going to “foam the runway” for the banks, pureeing Americans’ homes to make the foam.

But Eberly’s tenure coincided with the banks’ rebound — by the time she went to work for Geithner, they were rolling in dough, posting massive profits. As @ryanlcooper@mastodon.social put it, “If you force them to eat a bunch of foreclosure losses, maybe a few hundred billion over several years, it probably wouldn’t have been that bad.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPLbnr1mxBs

Moran nails it here: “When a bad loan is made, it is both prudent and fair for the lender to bear the most responsibility. They are supposed to be wise stewards of their own capital. Instead, ordinary homeowners who did the least of any actor to cause the financial crisis ended up eating the losses.”

Eberly and Krishnamurthy claimed that Geithner’s policy would be efficient, and that it wouldn’t lead to mass foreclosures. As neoclassical economists love to do, they “proved” this using elaborate mathematical models. And, also in the grand neoclassical tradition, they didn’t bother to check whether their model was correct.

To quote Ely Devons: “If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’”

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

Here’s what Eberly and Krishnamurthy missed: the choice to foreclose wasn’t being made by the lenders, they were being made by the mortgage servicer, a kind of consequence-free middleman who made more money by foreclosing on homeowners, even if the lenders lost more money over the long term:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228125783_Why_Servicers_Foreclose_When_They_Should_Modify_and_Other_Puzzles_of_Servicer_Behavior_Servicer_Compensation_and_its_Consequences

Eberly and Krishnamurthy barely mention the existence of servicers, but another researcher was keenly aware of them: a law prof named Katie Porter, who delved into the servicers’ role in foreclosure in a report for the California AG:

https://oag.ca.gov/sites/all/files/agweb/pdfs/mortgage_settlement/01-report-waiting-for-change.pdf

Porter identified the servicers’ “dual track” approach to distressed mortgage borrowers: on the one hand, they slow-walked HARP-based changes to payments, and on the other hand, they raced to foreclose on those borrowers who were waiting for their payments to reset.

The servicers’ hunger to throw people out of their homes knew no bounds: they set up massive robo-signing boiler-rooms where low-waged employees forged deeds to plug the paperwork holes created by the high-speed, unregulated speculation on mortgages that precipitated the Great Financial Crisis:

https://www.reuters.com/article/robosigning-plea/ex-mortgage-document-exec-pleads-guilty-in-robo-signing-case-idUSL1E8ML0C120121121

Eberly knew about robo-signing, she knew about servicers, she knew about foreclosures. It was her job to know. But she still wrote her paper defending Geithner’s runway-foaming and all those ruined lives:

Principal reduction can be helpful, but it is a less efficient use of government resources, since it back-loads payments to households that cannot borrow against these future resources to support consumption today, and also because it is most helpful in reducing strategic default, rather than payment-distress-induced default,

This is just means-testing by another name, a fetish for separating the “deserving poor” from “moochers” (AKA “strategic defaulters”). The PMC loves means-testing, but only for poor people. As Moran points out, rich people like Trump use strategic defaults all the time:

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/nyregion/donald-trump-atlantic-city.html

Elite economists and finance ghouls convinced themselves that helping people stay in their homes would enable waves of crooked “strategic defaulting” but there’s no evidence this was ever widespread — rather, it was a fairy tale that justified mass foreclosure:

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27585/w27585.pdf

Eberly helped throw millions of Americans into the street in order to reward reckless banks, already wildly profitable banks, with even more profit. And far from regretting this, she went on to write elaborate justifications for the cruel policies she helped administer.

The historian Michael Hudson describes debt and debt cancellation as a key determinant of whether a given civilization survives. In every venture, producers have to borrow capital from lenders — farmers, for example, must borrow to pay for seed and fertilizer and labor. When the ventures are successful, the borrowers pay back the lenders.

But not every venture can succeed. There will always be blights, droughts, fires and other risks that can’t be fully mitigated. When failure occurs, borrowers can’t pay back creditors. If you farm long enough, you’ll eventually lose a crop, and have to roll over your debts next year. Eventually, you’ll owe so much that you can’t even make the interest payments.

In the absence of some structured, periodic debt cancellation — such as the Bronze Age tradition of Jubilee — creditors eventually end up controlling the work of the entire productive sector. When that happens, your society stops producing what everyone needs, and instead just makes the things that rich people want:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/08/jubilant/#construire-des-passerelles

A civilization can’t survive if all of its farmers are growing ornamental flowers for rich creditors’ villas instead of staple crops. It can’t survive if every productive worker is stuck in a dead-end job or a dead-end place because of medical or student debt.

Personnel are policy. Eberly has explained, in excruciating detail, exactly what policy she favors — policy that rewards reckless speculation by incinerating the life chances of everyday Americans. Appointing her to the Federal Reserve board would be a giant Fuck You from the Biden admin to every person who got their home stolen by a bank.

Tomorrow (Mar 7), I’m doing a remote talk for TU Wien.

On Mar 9, you can catch me in person in Austin at the UT School of Design and Creative Technologies, and remotely at U Manitoba’s Ethics of Emerging Tech Lecture.

On Mar 10, Rebecca Giblin and I kick off the SXSW reading series.

Image: Medill DC (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Timothy_Geithner_in_2011.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[Image ID: A bombed out neighborhood. Over the crumbling houses is the 'HOPE' wordmark from Shepard Fairey's Obama campaign posters. On the right is the grinning face of Obama Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, colorized to match the Fairey posters. On the left is an ogrish, top-hatted capitalist figure, chomping a cigar and disdainfully holding aloft a single-family home between a gloved forefinger and thumb. He stands before a podium bearing the Citibank logo. The podium has a lever in the shape of a golden dollar-sign, which he is yanking with his free hand. He, too, has been colorized in the mode of the Fairey poster.]

[tocitynews]

Georgia Lawmakers To Rein In Aggressive Home Owners Associations After Hearing Homeowner Horror Stories – Atlanta Georgia reporting

You can be up to date on your mortgage, never missed a loan payment, and lose your home to foreclosure by your Homeowners Association.

▶︎ Each month Karyn Gibbons mailed a check for HOA dues on her Gwinnett County condo to the address provided in writing at closing. But she said she never knew when or if it would be cashed.

“It was just random. I mean there’d be two, three, four, five months go in between checks being cashed,” said Gibbons. Then out of the blue she was served with a notice of foreclosure by her Home Owners Association, with late fees and thousands of dollars in attorney fees.

She owed more than $30,000.

“Did you even know you could be foreclosed on by an HOA?” Gray asked Gibbons.

“No. Never heard of it,” Gibbons said.

▶︎ “It’s totally insane. It’s totally insane,” said Tricia Quigley, a former Cherokee County homeowner.

She learned it can happen the hard way.

When Quigley’s Cherokee County home of 18 years was sold at foreclosure on the courthouse steps for about the amount of spare change on her coffee table as Gray interviewed her.

“It went for $3.25,” Quigley said.

She admitted she did not pay two of her biannual homeowner association dues payments totaling $800.

She ended up paying more than $10,000 trying to get right with the HOA but the late fees and attorney fees kept growing.

“I kept thinking I paid all this money; how come it’s not stopping?” Quigley said.

A big reason is attorney costs.

Every email, every inquiry, every attempt to contest, fix, or even pay the overdue bill adds to the bill.

Channel 2 Action News checked foreclosure records and found that ▶︎ just two metro Atlanta law firms that specialize in representing HOAs have filed 279 notices seeking damage and foreclosure notices in just the past three years.

By the time Juliet Graham finally sold her downtown Atlanta condo her HOA bill had reached $250,000.

“You broke us. We’re broke,” Graham said.

“I can’t imagine the mafia having been any worse than what my experience was with this,” Graham said.

State Senator Donzella James, a Democrat who represents South Fulton County, introduced multiple bills this legislative session trying to reign in overly aggressive HOAs.

“People need to be protected and safeguarded against foreclosures,” said State Senator James.

“This is where I resodded the whole thing,” said James McAdoo, a homeowner in South Fulton County.

The only way he could stop his HOA from intercepting his paycheck was by filing for bankruptcy.

“They garnished my wages,” McAdoo said.

He owes $36,000 and counting predominantly because of weeds in his front yard.

They were garnishing $600 from his paycheck every two weeks until he started the bankruptcy process.

“What way do you see out of this?” Gray asked McAdoo.

“Selling my home and just getting out of this neighborhood,” McAdoo said.

That is what Karyn Gibbons did earlier this year even though she still does not believe she did anything wrong.

“I just said enough. I can’t do it anymore,” Gibbons said.

She paid $34,000 in fines, interest, and attorney fees to end the nightmare.

“I don’t know how it’s legal,” Gibbons said.

And it’s not just happening to homeowners. Gray also spoke with a couple who said just because they were renting a home, they were not safe from an HOA.

Jasmine Latson and Jaquan Hunter said their HOA in their South Fulton neighborhood came after them over the condition of their yard.

They ended up hiring a lawn service to take care of everything. But that wasn’t enough for the HOA.

“I was like, maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m not doing good enough, I don’t know. So I went ahead and just hired an outside resource that my neighbor used. He’s been pretty consistent and good, but the fines keep happening,” Latson said.

Last year, they received a foreclosure letter saying the home’s owners owed fines and fees of more than $23,000.

“Never, never in a million years would I have thought that I would have would be dealing with this. You know? I pay my rent every month,” Latson said.

First Key Homes, Latson, and Hunter’s landlord negotiated down the fines to about $12,000 to prevent foreclosure. But the company has now passed that bill onto the couple along with an eviction notice.

Latson has fired an attorney and has a court date set for Friday.

Now, these renters are hoping state lawmakers can do something about these aggressive HOAs.

▶︎ A bipartisan bill sponsored by state senator and Rules Committee Chair Matt Brass, a Republican representing Newnan, did pass at the Gold Dome this year to create a study committee examining how to change laws to better protect homeowners.

Brass told Gray the No. 1 topic on the study committee’s agenda will be HOA foreclosures that he said are taking families’ generational wealth.

“To have some outside group come and take that away from me is again, it’s un-American. And we’re not going to stand for it in this state,” Brass said.

Several states have put in place laws limiting HOA foreclosure.

[silveragelovechild]

On a whim I went to see “Drama Camp” a new film starring Ben Platt (of Dear Evan Hansen fame).

As the movie started, I had some doubt. The story is set in a summer drama camp in upstate New York. It’s a low budget film and has a kind of “gee, let’s put on a show” quality. I also senses the plot and dialogue may have been partially adlibbed.

In the opening we learn that Joan Rubinsky (Amy Sedaris) is having trouble making ends meet at a summer drama camp she owns. While recruiting students at a high school production of “Bye Bye Birdie” - strobe lights trigger a seizure and she falls into a coma.

But the show, and the Summer Camp, must go on.

The story follows two basic plot lines. First the interpersonal relationship between the Camp’s staff (all with inflated sense of their own talent). Years earlier, Platt and costar Molly Gordon both failed to get into Julliard. So they’ve have taught at the camp for 10+ years. Cracks in their friendship form when Gordon begins keeping secrets from Platt.

In a secondary role, Noah Galvin plays that techie guy with dreams of performing. Gavin and Platt are partners in real life but they don’t share any scenes in the film.

Although Platt co-wrote the script (and is a producer), his role, and most of the camp staff, are underwritten. They feel like characters in search of an author.

The real surprise of “Drama Camp” is the role played by Jimmy Tatro. He’s Joan’s son. He’s never understood his mother’s passion for theater yet he has to step in and run the camp. At first Tarto is a slightly dim witted guy who is out of his league. And the camp drama teachers pretty much ignore him.

But he soon learns about the camp financial situations and that the bank is planning to foreclose.

Tarto has the best character arc in the film. He realizes how important the camp is to kids who attend (many of them are “outsiders”). The camp gives them purpose.

Tarto keeps the foreclosure a secret but begins devises plots to make extra money to pay the bills. It’s fun seeing him evolve from a dumbass into to a hero.

And if that wasn’t enough, the movie’s ending more than makes up for any deficiencies with what came earlier. Of course that involves a performance of a an original musical about Joan’s life. Will Joan wake up from her coma in time to see it?!?

[lethalgadgets]

Home Foreclosure Help: 4 Ways to Prevent Foreclosure with Expert Assistance

[elladastinkardiamou]

This week's newsletter from AthensLive is out:

* The Greeks & the “Sultan”   

* Another law in favour of funds and servicers

* A policeman was seriously injured and in a coma - 400 arrested 

An important step towards the rapprochement between Greece and Turkey had been taken this week. Turkish President Erdogan visited Athens - and the two countries signed some 15 agreements. The ‘Sultan’ is admittedly unpredictable, yet this was a positive moment. Apart from the Greek FM caught on camera to… bow. 

A new law regarding ‘bad loans’ was passed this week. Despite mainstream media presenting it as favorable for debtors, it seems to give even more reasons to funds and servicers to prepare for a bigger party.

A policeman was severely injured and remains in a coma after an attack outside a venue where a volleyball game was taking place. It has been related to sports violence, yet the motives remain unclear. The police took some… 400 people to the station as a result. This reminded us of how the police don't always react to violence the same way.   

Read and share this week's updates on the events and developments in Greece here: https://steadyhq.com/en/athenslivegr/posts/88a3f41f-725b-4e2b-aedc-b0137d6256e8

For anyone with a wish or need to follow and to gain an insight into recent events in Greece and to read and support independent and investigative journalism in English, the weekly newsletter from AthensLive should be a core element in the reading flow.

If you want the best overview of the events and developments in Greece right now, this is the place to go. Not the mainstream Greek news, but independent journalism with sharp analysis and links to interesting and important topics from a variety of sources.

Become a member and get the newsletter in your inbox every week here:

https://steadyhq.com/en/athenslivegr/newsletter/sign_up

[nathanolsenart]

Mummy Woes

[oasisr]

Are real estate agents parasites?

[checktheotherroom]

hotel lobby

source; unknown

2023

[thesirlancelotgroup]

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[thesocialjusticewitch]

Reaching out to community members to help this awesome lesbian witch keep Cold Antler Farm. She's completely fantastic (she's a writer, she trains falcons, and she designs!) and could really use help. Her venmo is jennawog if you can pitch it anything at all!

[clemsfilmdiary]

Milk and Money (1936, Tex Avery)

Looney Tune #78

3/22/23

[lavideenrose]

It's so limiting to say what something is. It becomes nothing more than that.

David Lynch